No Suture: Rethinking Utopia Through J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the Occupy Movement, and Idle No More

Abstract

Adleman’s chapter explores J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace as an imaginative rearticulation of Sophocles’s Antigone. According to Adleman’s reading, David Lurie’s conservative utopian fantasy of a place (topos) or occupational sphere insulated against all potential onslaughts is situated at violent cross-currents with its raced, gendered, classed, and even species-related blindspots. Adleman posits that Coetzee’s novel figures a countervailing thanatopian mode of dissidence that reverberates through the Occupy and Idle No More movements. This seemingly futile thanatopian striving, Adleman argues, orients itself away from the neoliberal extraction of value and circulation of goods toward the generation of new values and ceaseless reconstitution of “the Good.”

They cultivate their gardens with great care, so that they have vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers in them; and all is so well ordered, and so finely kept, that I never saw gardens anywhere that were both so fruitful and so beautiful as theirs.

—Thomas More, Utopia

Oedipus’s final malediction […] gives rise to the catastrophic series of dramas to which Antigone belongs. Oedipus at Colonus ends with Oedipus’s last curse, “Never to have been born were best …” How can one talk of reconciliation in connection with a tone like that?

—Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis